A few years back it dawned on me that internet activity was moving to video, and I wanted to be a part of it. After consulting some friends on the virtues of Finalcut Pro vs Adobe Premiere, I signed up for a Premiere class on Lynda.com to start my production journey. While the content was thorough, I found the presentation a bit dry and not well suited for mobile. So within a couple months I experienced what usually happens when I discover a new earth shattering idea. I forgot all about it. My hopes of riding the video wave to the height of vlogger stardom were dashed in an instant.

Then six months later my college buddy Mo Koyfman revived my machinations over dinner when he mentioned Skillshare to me. Mo was a partner at Spark Capital at the time, and I had asked him about which of his portfolio companies was considering international expansion. I went home, signed up for one of the many Skillshare classes on Premiere and found the content much more digestible especially on mobile than some of the other platforms I had tried. Skillshare was also focused on the creative class, so beyond the ability to improve my technical chops I could also learn about design leadership from John Maeda or social media marketing from Gary Vaynerchuk.

As a very happy customer of the platform I told my partner Ramanan (who leads edtech efforts here at Amasia) about the company and CEO Michael Karnjanaprakorn with whom I had been tremendously impressed. In addition to a great product that fit my specific needs, a couple macro trends got us excited about the opportunity.

1.While historically intelligence was measured by the ability to store and recall information, in an age of infinite computing what sets capable people apart from incapable people is increasingly creativity. A platform focused on training the creative class prepared the world to go where the proverbial puck was heading.

2.In my parents generation folks worked for one employer their entire lives. My peers seem to be hopping around much more but the big trend for the next generation is a shift towards entrepreneurship and contract work. We can start to see it today in everything from photojournalists (leaving newspapers and working freelance) to mbas (choosing the valley over wall street) to uber drivers and airbnb hosts. In an era of large organizations and deep specialization, the finance guy didn’t need to know how to build a website. But in tomorrow’s world entrepreneurs of all backgrounds will need some basic skills around creativity. (Case in point: Yours truly… the VC who wants to know video)

Ramanan developed a great relationship with Michael and ended up co-leading the Series B financing. We're excited to work together on their expansion efforts, and perhaps as importantly just wanted to say thanks to Mo, Michael and the team for reviving hope in my video ventures. I’m definitely still a novice, but thanks to Skillshare I’m excited about the road ahead. Please feel free to view a couple Skillshare enabled videos below.

The Valley has long propagated the idea that nowhere else on planet earth matters much. The thinking goes that “since we are the center of all innovation and everyone follows what we do, there’s no need to draw inspiration from overseas and no need to focus on the distraction of international markets.” This may have been true for most of history because our universe was largely disconnected but today insular founders may disrupt themselves with the very technologies they create to connect the globe.

In the world of today and even more so in the world of tomorrow, entrepreneurs must adopt a global mindset to thrive and survive. How?

Inward – Out: Global Markets

The truth is that companies with limited resources are well served by attacking a small market segment and dominating it before branching out into other areas. In the world of yesterday where bits and atoms incurred significant friction traveling across geographic boundaries, it made sense to segment markets based on those same geographic boundaries. But as that friction deteriorates with advances in technology, market segmentation by geography makes less and less sense.

As one example, consider that a father and son in asia had more in common with each other than they did with a similar duo in the west up until even a generation ago. But now many would say that millenials around the world, because they are connected like never before, have much more in common with each other than they do with their parents in the very same country. As products, information, and culture travel across borders more seamlessly, CEOs must understand the nuances of global markets to survive.

Outward – In: Global Inspiration

Founders must not only focus on expanding outwards to a greater degree, they must also focus on drawing inspiration from the rest of the world like never before. As one example China for most of its history copied products from the US, but we’re now seeing the opposite flow in various verticals. Sources say Facebook Messenger’s product roadmap is essentially a list of current features from Wechat, which is far more advanced than any messaging platform we have in the west.

This is now more relevant than ever before, but the reality is that Silicon Valley always took inspiration from the rest of the world. Steve Jobs incorporated design elements into Apple products inspired by from eastern philosophy. In fact the foundation of almost every startup in the Valley (innovation accounting and the Lean startup method) was modeled after an Asian idea (Just in Time Manufacturing from Japan).

Heuristics can help as we build products and companies, but can also hurt if we fail to adjust them when necessary. The idea that international does not matter worked well in the local and linear world of yesterday, but in the exponential and connected world of tomorrow, entrepreneurs and investors who fail to adopt a global mindset are toast.

On our first day at the University of Pennsylvania, I huddled in with fifty freshman from the Jerome Fisher Dual Degree Program in Management and Technology (M&T) at an afternoon tea session to listen to the program’s esteemed director explain its origins.

“Since the industrial revolution the world has increasingly valued specialization. Each worker would master one task on the assembly line and perform it over and over again. In academia, scholars would receive bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in the same subject and then conduct research in the same field with little interaction across departments for the rest of their lives. The 20th century was all about building deep nodes in the system, but in the 21st century, those who can connect different nodes in the system will be best placed to unleash the most value.”

The M&T program’s founding director, Dr Bill Hamilton, was one of the first to explore the relationship between two of the system’s deepest nodes of business and engineering. After receiving a Masters from Penn Engineering and a Wharton MBA, Dr H moved to the corporate world and realized that engineers and business people couldn’t speak each other’s language or understand each other’s mindsets when solving problems. Fast forward to 2015 and the ability to bridge these world’s has landed Dr H with an impressive roster of board directorships, an illustrious academic career and thousands of glowing fans who have graduated from M&T over the last 4 decades.

Just the other day my wife sent me a quora post entitled “How can I be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Richard Branson”. The highest ranked answer (which you can find here) stated that by far the most important determinant of success is having an open network. The burgeoning field of network science has shown us that organisms tend to congregate with similar organisms, leading in humans to closed networks of people who think and act in similar ways. But those that straddle two or more of these communities with open networks have a broader set of ideas to draw from, a broader set of people to work with and the ability to generate breakthrough innovation. Steve Jobs exemplified this concept in leveraging his experiences with typography , eastern thought and music in the development of his products at Apple, now the world’s largest corporate concern.

At Amasia (admittedly not yet as substantial a concern as Apple), we focus on helping our portfolio companies traverse geographic boundaries but the concept of venturing across borders also applies in our overriding approach to growth, curiosity and open networks.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that music has played a big role in my life. Back in school I sang in the Chord On Blues acapella group and played in the University Symphony, a string quartet, and a Dave Matthews cover band. I eventually started a jam band called The Ally, touring around the country and performing to young, dreadlocked hippies (I made several unsuccessful attempts at dreadlocks myself).

One day, while we were recording The Ally’s first album at The Studio (a JV between The Roots and acclaimed producer Larry Gold), I was warming up on the violin in the corner when an African American man came up from behind and asked my bassist and guitarist, “Yo who dat playin’ the violin?”

“Oh that’s John Yohan Kimbo… he just came straight off the boat from Korea. Yeah he’s ok at the fiddle, but he doesn’t speak any English.”

“Oh for real?” He replied, walking closer towards me. I caught him out of the corner of my eye, turned around and threw my hand in the air to give him a high five.

“WASSUP MY MAN! I’m Kimbo… nice to meet you!”

He must have jumped 3 feet into the air, but after regaining his composure he asked if I might be down to play on a record sometime. That gentleman ended up being renowned producer Rodney Jerkins and the album I was to play on was the platinum record Full Moon by Grammy Award winning R&B singer Brandy.

Now back on campus, there was another John who also sang and played instruments in various musical groups. His last name was Stephens, and he also had a platinum record to his name for his piano performance in The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. He was talented and likable, and though we weren’t close, we had some close mutual friends (including Nihal Mehta from Eniac Ventures, Vijay Chattha from VSC and John's former manager, Paras Shah from Code and Theory).

John Stephens graduated a year before I did and moved to New York to become a management consultant, continuing to perform during nights and weekends. While at Penn, Stephens’s roommate was a music producer who happened to be Kanye West’s cousin. Some time after Stephens moved to New York, Kanye offered to produce his first solo album. John quit his job, changed his last name to Legend, (yes this is John Legend we’re talking about), went on a sold out tour with Kanye and Usher, and won 3 Grammies that year.

Way to make a guy feel unaccomplished!

A few years ago, Penn President Amy Guttmann told Barack Obama in conversation that John Legend is a Penn alumnus.

A couple of months ago I had lunch with a friend who invests in tech for one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. (There are only two and both of them manage hundreds of billions of dollars.) When I asked how he found dealing with VC’s, he told me the following story:

“Usually when we call a private equity manager, they offer to fly over and meet with us. When we walk into the conference room they basically bow and ask what they can do to get us to invest in their fund. But when I started reaching out to managers in the Valley, they wouldn’t reply! If they did, it was generally the same response of ‘we’re oversubscribed many times over so let’s not waste each others time.’ After some prodding and an offer to visit their office, usually I’d hear ‘well I’m really busy but maybe you can meet my associate’ and after a few meetings there if we were lucky, we’d meet with the partner a few times and hear ‘well we you know don’t move for anything less than 100 million dollars, but we’ll give you 5 million in a side vehicle where you pay higher fees and carry, and if you’re not that annoying, then maybe we’ll let you into the main fund for a larger allocation in the next round.’”

This sovereign wealth fund is now quite a substantial limited partner in some top tier funds, but it took them a while to get there.

When I joined the industry, a friend told me that VC’s have the highest ego/IRR ratio in the entire asset management universe. And while most investors have been very warm to me, I have seen some of them treating people with a level of disdain in the past.

To understand why, it’s important to look at the dynamics between venture capitalists and the two main groups of people they interact with: limited partners and entrepreneurs.

On the LP front, most fund managers either deal in the listed markets that represent trillions of dollars or in mature private companies in which buyout shops invest 500 billion dollars a year. Compare that to venture where you have only 50b a year deployed in the space.* Dispersion is also higher in VC than in any other asset class (slide below), so top quartile venture funds have even more limited access. Limited Partners find themselves clamoring over each other to get allocations into these funds and often invest in first-time funds which are much more rare in other asset classes.

As it relates to entrepreneurs, low barriers for starting a company lead to a large universe of founders looking for capital (much larger than the number of target companies at the later stage). A steady stream of emails asking for meetings leads to more ego in substance (“everyone wants to meet me so I must be really cool”) and perception (“this VC isn’t returning my email so he must be really cocky”).

At Amasia, we test for humility (in addition to confidence, which we feel is orthogonal to arrogance) in our entrepreneurs because even the best need to learn. As a Christian I personally feel that being humble is the morally correct modus operandi. No one wants to work with a jerk, so being humble and enabling oneself to work with a more quality group of partners/investors/employees happens to be the smart thing to do as well.

* Some figures that have the industry paced to invest $80b in 2015 include pre IPO tech financings which I personally don't consider venture.

I’m a big fan of top rated Wharton professorAdam Grantwhose best selling book Give and Take outlines the basic but counterintuitive truth that “givers” succeed in the business world more than “takers” or “matchers”. I’ve always felt intuitively that doing the right thing pays off in the long term, but now we have Professor Grant’s rich research and growing canon of examples to prove it. Giving is at the core ofAmasia’sDNA as a firm, and today’s announcement provides an opportunity to outline how our focus on giving led to our investment inSwitch Communications.

Given his pedigree as one of the world’s foremost experts in voice and communications, we were naturally excited to explore a partnership with Switch CEO Craig Walker. He had a lot of inbound interest from VCs and it took a couple of tries to get him on the phone. When he explained that the company wasn’t raising money we replied with 1. “no problem” and 2. “how can we be helpful”?

Given that Switch had Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz as the sole outside investors, the company’s needs were sorted in the US, but Craig expressed interest in partnerships with telecom operators overseas. Over the course of the next several months we introduced him to major business owners and CEOs of telecom operators in Asia, without any expectation in return. Our view was that we’d be happy to just call Craig a friend.

When it came time to start thinking about the next round of funding, Craig was very open to our participation because we had demonstrated differentiated access that was relevant to his business, but also because we were happy to be helpful without agitating to be investors. Our focus on cross border fit nicely with Switch because their product is global from day one. (One customer is deploying across 50 countries as we speak).

Most importantly, we found Craig to be a giver as well. At Grand Central (which he founded and sold to Google), Craig and his team gave away free voicemail to the homeless of San Francisco through a program called Project CARE (Communications and Respect for Everyone). This allowed them to keep in touch with their families and loved ones, but also fill out job applications properly as they were trying to get their lives back on track. Google Voice continues to implement this program today long after Craig’s departure.

Both Craig and we believe in the concept of giving in the context of business, but we also believe that giving needs to be “strategic” and thought of holistically. When Craig took over Dialpad in late 2001 he had to cut headcount (from a high of 300 staff and a monthly burn of $4m) to 15 employees. Craig brought Dialpad through the bust, and found a Korean investor to fund $4m with a promise to add another $10m shortly.Only $1m of the additional funding materialized so Craig asked his team (which he had begun to expand again) if they wanted to take 20% layoffs or a 20% across the board paycut. They chose the latter, and Craig promised that he would get them back to full compensation as soon as possible, and that they would be made whole on any difference.

About one year later Yahoo came in to buy Dialpad (which became Yahoo Voice) and Craig told the corp dev team that paying out this obligation to employees was at the top of his priority list. Not only were they paid the 20% arrears, but Craig also managed to convince the Korean investor to take 10% of the deal proceeds and distribute that to Dialpad employees (not including Craig).

His sole motive was to reward his team for working hard and seeing the company through the largest crash in the history of technology markets, but a side effect of Craig’s giving approach is that he has become a magnet for great talent. His core team from Dialpad has remained with him for the last 15 years, and with each successive incarnation he has added an additional layer of amazing talent.

It goes without saying that Craig’s vision of building an awesome unified communications experience for businesses is a form of giving as well.

Givers give because it’s the right thing, not because it’s the smart thing but as we can see from the Switch episode, the two are often aligned. I would highly recommend checking out Switch’s products, but also practicing a bit more giving in our own lives today.